Brain disorders such as stroke and Alzheimer's disease do not have effective therapies that can reverse their progression largely because of a lack of methods for regenerating sufficient numbers of new neurons for brain repair. The cell transplantation therapy using external cells to transplant into the brain or spinal cord (Buhnemann et al., 2006; Emborg et al., 2013; Nagai et al., 2010; Nakamura and Okano, 2013; Oki et al., 2012; Sahni and Kessler, 2010) have faced significant hurdles including immunorejection, tumorigenesis and differentiation uncertainty (Lee et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2013b; Lukovic et al., 2014). Recent studies have used viruses to express transcription factors in cells to convert them into neurons both in vitro and in vivo (Heinrich et al., 2010; Grande et al., 2013; Torper et al., 2013; Guo et al., 2014; Niu et al., 2013; Su et al., 2014). Some studies have used chemicals to convert fibroblast cells into neurons, which still need to be transplanted into the brain or spinal cord, facing all the difficulty of cell transplantation including immunorejection, tumorigenesis and differentiation uncertainty (Hu et al., 2015; Li et al., 2015). Using glial cells for neural conversion offers great advantages because they are resident cells throughout the nervous system, and are different from stem cells that are rather limited inside the nervous system. Another advantage is that glial cells can divide and regenerate themselves. Therefore, if some glial cells are converted into neurons, the remaining glial cells have the potential to divide and generate new glial cells. The present disclosure is pertinent to a need for methods for promoting conversion of glial cells into neurons.